


on rooftops

by partlysunny



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Pretty sad, set during the time skip, youve been warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 04:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2255355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partlysunny/pseuds/partlysunny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which Wally decides he wants out and Dick tries not to let it get to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on rooftops

on rooftops

 

Rooftops are their thing, specifically theirs. Dick knows all the really good rooftops in Gotham, the places where the view of the city is unparalleled, even in Bruce’s office in Wayne Tower. And Wally knows all the really good rooftops in Central City, and has even found an easy way to the top of the arch and sometimes they would sit up there, chow down whatever Wally has in his suit at the time, and watch the fog of light pollution hovering over the city, obscuring stars but still pretty, Dick supposes, in a sad sort of way.

Wally talks, as he is wont to do, and Dick chimes in, in between stuffing his face and staring out at the twinkling lights of the Midwestern city, and there’s a calm that only comes in high places where he is near invisible and with his closest friend, until it is utterly shattered with the last three words of a sentence that Dick doesn’t hear the beginning of: _leave the life_.

He turns sharply, and behind the medium of his domino mask he scans every part of Wally’s face until he is sure that he isn't being had. Then, he allows himself to say, “What?”

Wally shrugs, and his goggles reflect the cityscape before them. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Nevermind.” He crams a handful of chips into his mouth and Dick thinks he hears him say, “I knew this would happen.”

“Wait.” Dick doesn’t know why he feels like the rug has been pulled out from under him. “Are you saying... you want out?”

“Well, maybe. Yeah.”

“ _Why_?”

Wally’s eyebrows go up slowly. “Why do I want out?”

“Yes, why do you want out?” he repeats in a flat voice. He doesn’t usually find himself on the other side of a misunderstanding. It’s a strange feeling of not knowing exactly what is going on, and the fact that this is the one person he has always understood so well is unnerving. “You can’t want out of the life, you’re the one who forced yourself into it when you did that experiment.”

“Yeah, nevermind,” Wally mutters, and he opens another bag of chips.

After a minute of considering his options, Dick decides to go with _nag until they relent_.

“Okay, let’s say you left the life,” he says, trying to sound reasonable instead of like a wheedling kid. “Let’s say you left, what would you do?”

Wally contemplates a chip shaped like a teardrop. “I don’t know, Dick. Go to college, probably.”

“Okay! College. And why can’t you do that and be Kid Flash at the same time?”

“This chip looks funny. Should I eat it?”

Dick looks from the chip to the boy sitting beside him. He doesn’t look much like a boy anymore; there’s a few days’ growth smeared across his jaw and he’s taller, bigger. Dick still sees that kid with the freckles and the tan lines on his too pale face from the goggles, the one that’s too excitable for his own good, that almost got himself blown up so he could be meta, special, different. It’s beyond Dick, utterly beyond him, why he would want to be normal, now that he’s extraordinary and entering the best years of his life.

Wally holds the chip up and analyzes it from all angles. And Dick decides to let it go this once.

“I dare you to.”

“If I mutate into a monster, will you kill me?”

“Probably.”

“Wow, Dick, I always knew you’d be a good friend.”

“The greatest.”

Wally nudges him with a crumb covered finger. “The greatest.”

.::.

Rooftops are inherently theirs, everyone knows, especially Artemis, so Dick is thrown a curve when he lands silently on the top of the building he meets Wally at every other Sunday and sees the blonde of her hair catching the light of the setting sun. He quickly crouches behind an air ventilation system, a tangle of steel and plastic, and watches them as they sit in a companionable quiet, their legs dangling over the void, Wally’s hands flat on the ground behind him as he leans back, Artemis’s head on his shoulder. It’s nothing but it feels intimate and Dick knows he should either make his presence known or disappear but then Artemis says, “He doesn’t want to lose you,” and he knows, he _knows_ she’s talking about him.

“He isn't losing me, Jesus Christ,” Wally says with a groan. “I’ll be in the same country and everything. There’s probably a zeta tube in Palo Alto. I can literally visit him whenever he wants me to.”

“It’s not the same. He’ll still be working, and you’ll be out.”

“Yeah, but he can still see me whenever—”

“Are you really that stupid?” she snaps.

“Are you really that stupid?” he repeats in a high pitched impression of Artemis’s voice, which earns him a slap on the back of the head. “Ow. Okay. I know what you’re trying to say, but he’s just being weird. He literally cannot comprehend it. It will not pass through his brain. Like I’m talking in another goddamn language.”

“Well, he’s _your_ best friend, so you are the only one who can drill it into his skull.”

Dick feels an ache in his knuckles and glances down, seeing how tightly he’s holding onto the edge of the air ventilator, and when he lets go, he has to stretch his fingers all the way out to get the blood flowing again.

Artemis continues, oblivious to Dick’s discomfort, to his silent urges for her to shut up and go away, “You have to tell him, because if he finds out from someone else, it’ll get ugly.”

“I know,” Wally says, in a quieter voice. “I know that. I’ll do it.”

She gets to her feet after giving him a swift kiss. “See you later?”

“Okay.”

She hops off the edge of the rooftop and Dick hears her boots colliding with the fire escape. Wally stays where he is, staring off into the sunset, and Dick stays where he is, hunched in the shadows. Palo Alto. He knows he should be proud but all he can feel is the need to sigh very heavily. He tries for a moment to imagine a domesticated Wally, going to college and working and not doing anything remotely heroic and only using his powers to mow his lawn or something. It feels like a terrible waste. In the end, he too hops off the rooftop and sends Wally a text saying he can’t make it.

 _No prob, I’ve got a hot date with a certain blonde archer_ , he writes back.

Dick sends off a cursory _LOL_ even though his face is showing as much emotion as a brick.

.::.

Rooftops have been theirs since the day Batman and the Flash decided to pair them off to patrol Central City a few months after Wally began exhibiting powers. The mentors took on a threat in Gotham while Wally and Dick sat on the top of a skyscraper and ate everything in Wally’s suit.

Batman came to collect Dick and Wally asked when they could do it again, and Batman configured the earliest version of the schedule they still use. The next meeting came and Dick waited for Wally on top of Wally’s school and Wally brought with him a bag of marshmallows that they roasted over the remnants of heat from a small explosion Dick created and controlled with expert hands.

“I thought it’d just be me and Uncle Barry but this is nice,” Wally said as he watched Dick spear a marshmallow on a batarang and hold it over the fire. “This is easier with a friend.”

Dick had a lot to say about how reckless recreating the lab accident that had turned his uncle into a speedster was, and that Wally was a little careless and a lot dumb, but his words struck and Dick stared into the glowing embers and the ash tracks the explosion had created and realized he was right. He had been alone, and now he wasn’t. And it was easier.

And Wally, barely fourteen, still caught in the thrall of heroics and the idea that that was his to be his new life from then on, looked at Dick and asked, “Do you ever want to be normal?”

“Isn't it too late for you to be asking around for advice?” Dick said.

“I’m not, I’m just asking to ask. Do you?”

Dick shook his head. “No. This is it.”

Something flashed over Wally’s face but he brushed it off and stuffed a blackened marshmallow into his mouth and grinned. Dick was eleven. He just grinned right back.

.::.

Rooftops are theirs, and Dick doesn’t know who will lounge around on the concrete top of a high rise with him when Wally’s off on the other side of the country being normal.

“I’m going to have to replace you,” Dick says nonchalantly, already bringing up a list of people in his head, scratching off a few right off the bat. Maybe Zatanna. Or Kaldur. “I hope you understand how grueling this will be for me.”

“I know, I’m one of a kind,” Wally mutters, smiling, but it doesn’t quite touch his face, and he turns to stare out at the city laid out before them.

“No, you aren’t. I’m replacing you right now. That makes you one in, like, ten.”

“Ten?”

“Ten.”

“I’m a little offended.”

“And I’m plenty onended, so. There’s that.”

Wally smiles again. It’s sad, small, and Dick feels like there’s a person sitting on his chest. He pretends to be busy checking something in his utility belt as he says, “Why did you even force these powers on yourself if you were just gonna bail a few years later? I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I,” Wally says.  “I guess I overestimated the responsibility.”

“Is that it?” Dick asks, disappointed, although he can’t exactly tell why. “Because you can’t handle the responsibility?”

“Nah.”

“What, then?”

Wally casts him a sidelong glance. “You’ll laugh.”

“I probably will.”

He shrugs and says, “Artemis,” and Dick doesn’t laugh, he groans.

“Are you kidding me? For a girl? And a girl who knows you’re Kid Flash, no less, I mean, getting out doesn’t even mean anything, _she already knows who you are_.”

“Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t get it.” He turns fully so that he’s facing Dick, sitting perfectly still for once, not fidgeting or tapping his feet or eating, just being. “I love the life, I love working and I love running and I’ll never stop, but I also love Artemis, and I love what we have. There’s something here, something good, and I want to give it a chance to grow. And it can’t grow if we’re under constant danger basically all the time. Dick, this might be it, dude.” And he sounds so excited, like he used to about going to McDonald’s after patrol when they were first starting out, that Dick can’t keep back a smile despite himself.

“Don’t you dare say true love,” Dick says warningly.

Wally laughs. They sit in silence for a beat, Dick swinging his feet over the sheer twenty story drop, Wally still unmoving, like a sculpture.

“I’m just saying,” Dick says, putting his hands up. “If your children end up being speedsters too, then you can count me the hell out of babysitting.”

It looks like something lifts from Wally’s shoulders, and Dick is suddenly aware, like a switch has been flicked, just how much Dick’s disapproval has been weighing on him.

“Dick,” he begins, but Dick just shakes his head and tries to keep his smile up.

“It’s okay, KF.”

“No, I just... I’m sorry. I know I’m kinda leaving you high and dry but this is something I have to see out.”

“I know.”

“You’re still my BFF,” Wally adds, batting his eyelashes.

“I better be,” Dick says.

Wally gets to his feet. He’s in civvies. Dick supposes he should start getting used to seeing him like this.

“Alright, man, I have to go home. I have a test tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Dick says quickly. He feels like something is dawning on him, slowly and then suddenly, like he’s seeing the punch coming but the impact still shocks him, and he looks up at Wally and realizes that he will never go on another mission with him, never patrol with him, never find him lounging around in the Cave and just hang out with him, never rely on his presence for backup, never meet with him on a rooftop in the city with the world sprawled out beneath them like it isn't even real and they’re either kings of it all or the only people left anywhere. It’s like a kick in the gut, like he’s getting one of his legs cut off, and Dick can’t even speak for a moment.

Wally sits back down beside him.

“So, like,” Dick says, trying to sound casual, but there’s desperation in his words anyway, “what am I supposed to do, Wally?”

Silence. Sirens and helicopters and the wind whistling past them, the background noises of a busy city, people breathing and living and blissfully unaware.

“Dude,” Wally says, and he’s that skinny kid with the freckles again, “you really think I’d leave unless I thought you’d be okay without me?”

Dick smiles. Wally claps his shoulder and gets up again.

“We’re gonna have to think up another schedule,” he says.

“See how much trouble you cause me?” Dick asks, sighing.

Wally laughs a laugh that stays on the rooftop long after he’s gone.

.::.

Rooftops are theirs, even after Dick has brought a rotating cast of characters to it frequently, to fill up the Wally-sized hole left behind, and Wally traces a _Zatanna was here_ written in black marker on the floor of the top of a building in Gotham and smiles.

“So, you come here to deface public property, huh?” he asks, grinning.

Dick laughs. “What’s a little graffiti every now and then?”

“My God, he’s gone dark side!”

They sit on the edge of the building and Dick feels a thousand years older than the last time he had met with Wally on a rooftop, still in Robin’s red and black. He supposes they’ve both changed, and that it wasn’t all for the worse.

Wally shows him pictures of his new home and the campus and Artemis and their dog and it’s all so very normal that it’s like a neon sign has been attached to Wally’s head, glaring and painfully obvious. Dick listens to the city, as alive as the two of them, to Wally eating with his mouth hanging open as he describes everything in copious detail, and if he closes his eyes, it’s almost like nothing’s changed at all.


End file.
